Entries by bthacker

The top 10 must do meals in Japan.

In Japan it’s almost impossible to have a bad meal. Food is so highly respected – revered even – by most Japanese people, that you can find great food everywhere. Even in convenience stores – we had some incredibly tasty and fresh chicken karaage from a Seven-Eleven. I’ve had lots of different and interesting meals in Japan, but I […]

Kooky Japan

Japan is kooky. And I love it. On my recent trip to Japan I took my daughter Jasmine for her first visit and took great joy introducing her to the wonderful oddities of one of my favourite countries in the world. Here are our Top Ten Kooky things we saw or experienced:

A grasshopper walks into a bar…

…and the bartender looks at him in surprise and says, ‘We have a drink named after you!’ The grasshopper looks even more surprised and says, ‘You have a drink named Kevin!’ On my recent trip to New Orleans I had a ‘Grasshopper’ cocktail at the bar that it was invented in. I was in Tujagues Bar in the […]

The Top 10 graveyards in the world.

I’m not a taphophile (someone with a love of funerals, graves and cemeteries), but I do like visiting a good cemetery or graveyard when I travel. I’ve just recently come back from a trip to the States where a spent a few days in New Orleans and while I was there I went to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. It’s the […]

The 10 most exotic places to get married.

This weekend I’m going to a wedding in a zoo in Wisconsin. That’s a sentence I’ll probably never say again. I love a ‘destination’ wedding and what’s not to like about celebrating nuptials with an African pygmy hedgehog and a striped skunk on the shores of Lake Michigan (oh, and it’s not the hedgehog and skunk getting married). I’ve had quite […]

War tourism.

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Somme. It was the biggest battle of World War I and 485,000 allied (mostly British and French) and 630,000 German troops were killed. It also makes it one of the bloodiest battles in human history. After four months of fighting the Allied forces penetrated a mere 10 kilometres into German-occupied territory. […]

Top 10 religious monuments.

I’m not a religious man, but oh my gosh do those religious folks make some damn fine monuments. And not only are these often spectacular monuments to a higher being a must-see part of many an itinerary, I have even gone totally out of my way to visit them – from Bagan in Burma to Borobudur in Indonesia. Here are my […]

Fence putter-upperer and other jobs overseas.

Have you ever run out of money while travelling and had to find work (as in any work) so that you can keep travelling – or simply just to feed yourself? When I returned to London after travelling around Europe on my first Big Trip Overseas I desperately needed cash (I had around $50 in my pocket) and scraped around […]